Coronavirus and ibuprofen: WHO addresses the warning

[Princess Turandot]

1. Live Science had a decent article on this...

The French health minister was referring to a letter submission to Lancet. Subsequent to his comments, the researchers added a statement on how to interpret their letter, which puts forth what the authors say is a hypothesis that is 'information for researchers, not patients' that 'does not constitute a recommendation to use certain drugs or not.'

Live Science: Should you take ibuprofen if you have COVID-19?

There's a lot of speculation but very little data to say one way or another.

The health minister's warning was based on a recent letter published in the journal The Lancet that suggested such anti-inflammatory drugs boost the body's production of an enzyme that sits on the cell's surface, known as ACE2. The coronavirus hijacks these ACE2 receptors to enter human cells.The authors hypothesized that drugs that spur the body to produce more of this enzyme would allow the virus to infect more cells, which in turn could increase the risk of developing "severe and fatal" COVID-19.

"The only problem is they offer no proof that this actually occurs," Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, wrote on Twitter. "And this hypothesis relies on several major assumptions that may not be true."